CHRONIC CITY(ISBN=) 英文原版

“Astonishing….Knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken
sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight
line…..Turbocharged….Intricate and seamless….A dancing
showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the
girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral
compass.”–New York Times Book Review

“Chronic City is a feverish portrait of the anxiety and
isolation of modern Manhattan, full of dark humor and dazzling
writing….proves both funny and frightening.”–Entertainment
Weekly

“Exuberant literary revving…..Lethem’s vision of New York can
approach the Swiftian. It is impressively observant in its detail
and scourging in its mocking satire. There are any number of wicked
portraits….His comments on New York life are often achingly
exact….So pungent and imaginative”–The Boston Globe

“Ingenious and unsettling…Lethem pulls everything together in a
stunning critique of our perceptions of reality and our
preconceptions of the function of literature.”–San Francisco
Chronicle

“Exquisitely written…Funny and mystifying, eminently quotable,
resolutely difficult, even heartbreaking, “Chronic City”
demonstrates an imaginative breadth not quite of this
world.”–Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A fluid sense of reality pervades these pages, which explore high
society, urban politics, avant-garde art, celebrity mania and the
dangers of information overload in an age where context is devalued
or ignored….the quality of Lethem’s prose and the exuberance of
his imagination are reasons enough to read it…..When it comes to
style, Lethem has few equals.”–Miami Herald

“The novel functions much like Manhattan used to – a mad scramble
of connections made and, more often, missed…make(s) a reader ache
for a city long gone.” –Esquire 

“Entertaining….a prosopographical investigation of New
York City by way of a handful of strange, unclassifiable characters
(and some remarkable writing)….splendidly observed”–Wall
Street Journal

“Brilliant….exquisite wit and dazzling intricacy of every single
paragraph……roves he’s one of the most elegant stylists in the
country, and he’s capable of spinning surreal scenes that are equal
parts noir and comedy…. evocative and engaging….As a
reflection on modern alienation and the chronic loneliness that
afflicts us in our faux world, this is beautifully, often
powerfully done.”–The Washington Post

“A sprawling book about pop culture and outer space…realistic and
fantastic, serious and funny, warm and clear eyed. One of the new
generation’s most ambitious writers, Lethem again offers a novel
that deals with nothing less important than the difference between
truth and lies. And some stories about good cheeseburgers.”–The
Daily Beast 

“A stellar, multi-layered novel.” – GQ 

“Lethem has often sought to interweave the realistic and the
fantastic; in Chronic City the result is nearly seamless.” – New
York Magazine

“[Lethem is] a writer who resists pigeonholing….it’s
hard to remain unsusceptible to his euphoria”–Los Angeles
Times

“Friction, charisma, unpleasantness, and threat are key to this
tale of scintillating misfits…..dizzyingly brilliant urban
enigma”–O Magazine

“One of America’s finest novelists explores the disconnections
among art, government, space travel and parallel realities, as his
characters hunger for elusive meaning…… All truths and realities
are open to interpretation, even negotiation, in this brilliantly
rich novel….Lethem’s most ambitious work to date.”—Kirkus
Reviews, starred
 “Pow! Letham has done it again. When it comes to brainy
adventures full of laughter and heart this master has few equals.
What a joy from the first page to the last.”—Gary Shteyngart,
author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s
Handbook
 “I’m reminded of the well-rubbed Kafka line re: A book must
be the axe to break the frozen sea within us. Lethem’s book, with
incredible fury, aspires to do little less. It’s almost certainly
his best novel. It’s genuinely great.”–David Shields, author of
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

The bestselling and beloved author of Motherless Brooklyn
and The Fortress of Solitude delivers a searing love letter
to the city that has inspired his finest work.
 
Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in
life—permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit,
where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fiancée, Janice
Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance
encounter collides Chase with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru
with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in
town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories Chase
and Perkus discover they have a lot in common, including a cast of
friends from all walks of life in Manhattan.  Together and
separately they attempt to define the indefinable, and enter into a
quest for the most elusive of things: truth and authenticity in a
city where everything has a price. 

JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of seven novels. A recipient of
the MacArthur Fellowship, Lethem has also published his stories and
essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling
Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, among
others.

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he
worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is
itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.) his was in the
headquarters of the Criterion Collection, on Fifty- second Street
and Third Avenue, on a weekday afternoon at the end of summer. I’d
gone there to record a series of voice- overs for one of
Criterion’s high- end DVD reissues, a “lost” 1950s film noir called
The City Is a Maze. My role was to play the voice of that
film’s director, the late émigré auteur Von Tropen Zollner. I would
read a series of statements culled from Zollner’s interviews and
articles, as part of a supplemental documentary being prepared by
the curatorial geniuses at Criterion, a couple of whom I’d met at a
dinner party.
In drawing me into the project they’d supplied me with a batch of
research materials, which I’d browsed unsystematically, as well as
a working version of their reconstruction of the film, in order for
me to glean what the excitement was about. It was the first I’d
heard of Zollner, so this was hardly a labor of passion. But the
enthusiasm of buffs is infectious, and I liked the movie. I no
longer considered myself a working actor. This was the only sort of
stuff I did anymore, riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing
celebrity, the smoky half- life of a child star. An eccentric
favor, really. And I was curious to see the inside of Criterion’s
operation. This was the first week of September—the city’s back-
to- school mood always inspired me to find something to do with my
idle hands. In those days, with Janice far away, I lived too much
on the surface of things, parties, gossip, assignations in which I
was the go- between or vicarious friend. Workplaces fascinated me,
the zones where Manhattan’s veneer gave way to the practical
world.

I recorded Zollner’s words in a sound chamber in the technical
swing of Criterion’s crowded, ramshackle offices. In the room
outside the chamber, where the soundman sat giving me cues through
a headset, a restorer also sat peering at a screen and guiding a
cursor with a mouse, diligently erasing celluloid scratches and
blots, frame by digital frame, from the bare bodies of hippies
cavorting in a mud puddle. I was told he was restoring I Am
Curious (Yellow). Afterward I was retrieved by the producer
who’d enlisted me, Susan Eldred. It had been Susan and her
colleague I’d met at the dinner party—unguarded, embracing people
with a passion for a world of cinematic minutiae, for whom I’d felt
an instantaneous affection. Susan led me to her office, a cavern
with one paltry window and shelves stacked with VHS tapes, more
lost films petitioning for Criterion’s rescue.
Susan shared her office, it appeared. Not with the colleague from
the party, but another person. He sat beneath the straining
shelves, notebook in hand, gaze distant. It seemed too small an
office to share. The glamour of Criterion’s brand wasn’t matched by
these scenes of thrift and improvisation I’d gathered in my behind-
the- scenes glimpse, but why should it have been? No sooner did
Susan introduce me to Perkus Tooth and give me an invoice to sign
than she was called away for some consultation elsewhere.

He was, that first time, lapsed into what I would soon learn to
call one of his “ellipsistic” moods. Perkus Tooth himself later
supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from
ellipsis. A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in
which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, not struggling to
finish a thought nor to begin one. Merely between. Pause button
pushed. I certainly stared. With Tooth’s turtle posture and the
utter slackness of his being, his receding hairline and antique
manner of dress— trim- tapered suit, ferociously wrinkled silk with
the shine worn off, moldering tennis shoes—I could have taken him
for elderly. When he stirred, his hand brushing the open notebook
page as if taking dictation with an invisible pen, and I read his
pale, adolescent features, I guessed he was in his fifties—still a
decade wrong, though Perkus Tooth had been out of the sunlight for
a while. He was in his early forties, barely older than me. I’d
mistaken him for old because I’d taken him for important. He now
looked up and I saw one undisciplined hazel eye wander, under its
calf lid, toward his nose. That eye wanted to cross, to discredit
Perkus Tooth’s whole sober aura with a comic jape. His other eye
ignored the gambit, trained on me.

“You’re the actor.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So, I’m doing the liner notes. For The City Is a Maze, I
mean.”
“Oh, good.”
“I do a lot of them. Prelude to a Certain Midnight . . .
Recalcitrant
Women . . . The Unholy City . . . Echolalia .
. .”
“All film noir?”
“Oh, gosh, no. You’ve never seen Herzog’s Echolalia?”
“No.”
“Well, I wrote the liner notes, but it isn’t exactly released
yet.
I’m still trying to convince Eldred—”

Perkus Tooth, I’d learn, called everyone by their last name. As
though famous, or arrested. His mind’s landscape was epic, dotted
with towering figures like Easter Island heads. At that moment
Eldred—Susan—returned to the office.

“So,” he said to her, “have you got that tape of
Echolalia
around here somewhere?” He cast his eyes, the good left and the
meandering
right, at her shelves, the cacophony of titles scribbled on
labels
there. “I want him to see it.”
Susan raised her eyebrows and he shrank. “I don’t know where it
is,” she said.
“Never mind.”
“Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?”
“What do you mean?”

Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, then we
made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth
hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique
felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many
others behind midtown edifices, was tiny and rattletrap, little
more than a glorified dumbwaiter—there was no margin for pretending
we hadn’t just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating
slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor
apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasn’t some dapper
retro- fetishist. His shirt collar was grubby and crumpled. The
greengray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a
janitor’s bucket.

“So,” he said again. This “so” of Perkus’s—his habit of introducing
any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk—wasn’t in any sense
coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a
daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for
yours. “So, I’ll lend you my own copy of Echolalia, even
though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see
it.”
“Sure.”
“It’s a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison
Groom’s Nowhere Near. Groom’s movie was never finished, you
know. Echolalia documents Herzog’s attempts to interview
Marlon Brando on Groom’s set. Brando doesn’t want to give the
interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots
whatever Herzog’s said . . . you know, echolalia . . .”
“Yes,” I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by
Tooth’s torrential specifics.
“But it’s also the only way you can see any of Nowhere Near.
Morrison Groom destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in
Echolalia are, ironically, all that remains of the
film—”  Why “ironically”? I doubted my hopes of inserting the
question.
“It sounds incredible,” I said.
“Of course you know Morrison Groom’s suicide was probably
faked.”
My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to
the pavement, tangling at every threshold: “You first—”
“Oops—” “After you—” “Sorry.” We faced each other, mid-Wednesday
Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew
formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasn’t
harassing me.
“So, I’m off.”
“Very good to see you.” I’d quit using the word meet long
ago, replacing it with this foggy equivocation, chastened after the
thousandth time someone explained to me that we’d actually met
before.
“So—” He ground to a halt, expectant.
“Yes?”
“If you want to come by for the tape . . .”
I might have been failing some test, I wasn’t sure. Perkus Tooth
dealt in occult knowledge, and measured with secret calipers. I’d
never know when I’d crossed an invisible frontier, visible to
Perkus in the air between us.
“Do you want to give me a card?”

He scowled. “Eldred knows where to find me.” His pride intervened,
and he was gone. For a phone call so life- altering as mine to
Susan Eldred, I ought to have had some fine reason. Yet here I was,
dialing Criterion’s receptionist later that afternoon, asking first
for Perkus Tooth and then, when she claimed no familiarity with
that name, for Susan Eldred, spurred by nothing better than a
cocktail of two parts whim and one part guilt. Manhattan’s
volunteer, that’s me, I may as well admit it. Was I curious about
Echolalia, or Morrison Groom’s faked suicide, or Perkus
Tooth’s intensities and lulls, or the slippage in his right eye’s
gaze? All of it and none of it, that’s the only answer. Perhaps I
already adored Perkus Tooth, and already sensed that it was his
friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my
being. To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I’d drifted.
How very soon after our first encounter I’d come to adore and need
Perkus makes it awfully hard to know to what extent such feelings
were inexplicably under way in Susan Eldred’s office or that
elevator.

“Your office mate,” I said. “They didn’t recognize his name at the
front desk. Maybe I heard it wrong—”
“Perkus?” Susan laughed. “He doesn’t work here.”
“He said he wrote your liner notes.”
“He’s written a couple, sure. But he doesn’t work here. He
just comes up and occupies space sometimes. I’m sort of Perkus’s
babysitter. I don’t even always notice him …